Yay! Final day of challenge.

I just read Olle's listening blog and I firmly fit in the category of having to listen to something again and again before understanding. The solution? Immersion. I got to go to China. In the meantime, there's youtube.

I'm replaying each sentence until I can visualize each character as it is said. Somehow that gets me through the parts that otherwise would sound all mushed together and would literally fall on deaf ears.

为什么你让我傻笑？

Intensive listening to music video of Wang Dawen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogshBQVCio I'm discovering that listening is less about matching sounds to characters and more to evoking meaning and mental images that are already in one's brain.

Started new song lyrics sung by Dawen.

Finished Cry Like a Baby.

Even if I know all the characters in a dialog, listening is hard because my expectations for how the characters are used in combination is very fundamental and the grammar/word order is so different from English. For example, when I hear 突然沉默是又想起你的笑容 (this is what is written as a subtitle) it takes me at least 5 minutes of thinking, repetition, and analysis to come up with "I suddenly go quiet when I think again of your smile" or even better "Remembering your smile again, I suddenly go quiet." I'm just hoping that somehow, one day, after many hours of Chinese study, things will eventually click

Still plugging along.

I started intensive listening to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFh13NNTDmk 哭得像小孩 (Cry like a Baby) Pop singer Zhao Youting. Songs are much easier to hear, at least songs sung at a romantic pace.

Finally finished part II of the Youtube video.

Continuing FluentU video.

Really going into the deep end of intensive listening. I replay as many times as necessary to recognize every word that is being said. It is a combination of getting my ears fine tuned to pick up natural language pronunciation as it's really spoken and as well as building up my ability to predict what will be said without hearing the whole message.

Now listening to the second part of video I started last week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=213&v=OBynh0BbO7s. Listening intensively repeating each sentence until I can hear and understand everything that's being said.

Do men slur their words more than women? The guy on this video skips across words like a rock skimming over a pond. I'm ending up trying to match his words to the characters in the subtitle by which tone he uses. The woman is much easier to understand.

Got some doozies today. I got a 没有 that sounded like "min" and a 回家 that sounded like "zheng". They are using sounds that have no correspondence in my particular set of brain synapses. Birgit, you are listening up a storm. Keep it up.

I'm doing intensive listening with this Youtube video with Chinese subtitles. I swear that they are saying something different from what I am reading, but have resigned myself that whatever the pronunciation, they are saying the characters in the subtitles. When listening to the dialogue again and again, I can often get the pronunciation deformed as it is to fit. I can't believe that babies can pick up language at all.

Continuing FluentU video Intermediate 1 level.

Started off with https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=OBynh0BbO7s

FluentU Youtube video commercial for an Oppo cellphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=157&v=fI8nh6Rh9oI. Listened to several times. All the vocab is easy, but the speed and phrasing make it hard. Only fully got it after looking at text in FluentU.

Listened to three more videos at the Beginner 2 level on Fluent U. But they were too simple, I'm going do more advanced videos next time.

Beginner 2 FluentU videos on body part song and getting a taxi.

Listening to Beginner 2 level videos on FluentU. I can read at a solid intermediate level, but listening is at a basic level. I take full advantage of FluentU's repeat feature for hearing and rehearing the videos.